This chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are more marginal. It uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays. These efforts take the form of resistance to marriages and efforts to forestall political events, often wars, frequently pointing to flaws in the male leaders’ plans. It highlights such inconclusive interventions as moments that demand engagement and interpretation by the audience, inviting spectators to unbalance the supposed didactic and moral purpose of the plays by attaching their sympathies to the characters out of power, rather than the kings who command them. Such imaginative potential is seen particularly clearly in the marginalised figures of lower-class female characters, as well as the women whose scenes are dismissed as ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ – in truth, scenes whose interactions depict the types of events unrecorded by traditional history but which are essential to the history play as a theatrical genre. The presence of these curtailed or unrecorded incidents, and their thematic importance to the plays in which they appear, suggests that the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources is less one of direct adaptation than of querying and contestation.

The third chapter explores how female characters narrate history within the plays themselves, particularly when they appear to transgress the boundaries of historical possibility through curses, prophecy, or describing events they have not seen – extra-historical powers enabled by their marginalisation from political power. It proposes the concept at the heart of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy: that marginalisation from political power gives way to other types of insight enabled by the medium of the theatre, a specifically feminine relationship to historical narrative that I call Shakespeare’s feminine historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the connection between mourning and cursing, the chapter explores the ‘genealogies of loss’ that permit female characters to articulate their own versions of dynastic history. I then turn to other ways that female characters are marginalised from the centres of historical power, and the clarity of historical vision that their outsider position grants them, rendering them simultaneously suppressed and empowered by their exclusion. Finally, this chapter considers how genre itself operates as a force for this exclusion, exploring scenes which seem to defy the tonal and generic boundaries of their plays, suggesting Shakespeare’s awareness of the limitations of the history play genre for containing certain types of female stories.

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an anti-martyr in the two parts of Henry IV. The character of Falstaff isloosely based on the fifteenth-century Lollard martyr John Oldcastle and was indeed once called Oldcastle in performance. Even though Shakespeare transforms the martyr into a cowardly dissembler, who has very little to do with the Lollard martyr, countless allusions to Oldcastle’s martyrdom provide a meaningful interpretative framework for Falstaff’s ‘better part of valour’. However, this does not mean that Shakespeare mocks the Proto-Protestant as part of a Catholic or anti-Puritan campaign. On the contrary, in contrast with the politically subversive martyr figure in 2 Henry IV, Archbishop Scrope, Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard martyr rather amounts to a defence of the Elizabethan ideal of outward conformity. Falstaff’s dissimulation, insofar as it can be read as a rejection of martyrdom, is a form of political obedience. Moreover, Falstaff’s dissimulation also entails a defence of theatrical dissimulation that aligns Shakespeare’s theatre closely with the religious policies of the Elizabethan government.